This blog has moved, permanently, to mavergames.net

I migrated this blog to Drupal. Please visit mavergames.net and update your RSS feed to this one.

Thanks!

Chris

Drupal and CVS and “clean builds” and backends and huh?

Okay, I’m admittedly NOT a programmer or IT systems person. I’m a librarian by training, who has, through years of effort, become a web manager and information architect. So, when our programmers suggest some possible frameworks for our Drupal installation’s backend, I’m just clueless.

There is testing going on right now to create a backend CVS repository for maintaining our Drupal installation(s), I say “sure, why not!” Then, when terms like “clean build” start getting thrown around, I’m lost. Is using a CVS repository in this way simply a way to manage the Drupal files? I would have thought Drupal itself would have a way to manage versions and the versions of it’s modules, etc. Is this overkill to create such a backend way of managing one’s Drupal installation? Couldn’t we just make backups of all files and databases on a regular (hourly, daily) basis and restore the files if there is a problem. Doesn’t Drupal store, via Devel Module, who changes what and thus, in a sense, “versions” of what’s configured?

Also, our Drupal is installed in a manage cloud environment, Rackspace Cloud Sites. How does this proposed backend interact with the cloud?

So many questions… Can anyone who “speaks IT” help me understand these issues, please?

More “Cloud” issues

Mosso’s Cloud Sites hosting environment, now the Rackspace Cloud (What was wrong with Mosso?), has worked brilliantly so far after an initial scare (see earlier post here). Last week, we reached another perceived impasse where we thought, again, that we needed a Cloud Server in order to accomplish a multi-site Drupal installation. Our programmers just couldn’t see how we could get away without shell access to the Cloud Sites environment on the Rackspace Cloud where can do more complex configuration than perhaps Drupal itself, in php, would allow.

Alas, after discussing our concerns with our Systems Administrator and chatting with someone at Rackspace (their “fanatical tech support” is still great!), we are sticking with the Cloud Sites platform. The scalability of Cloud Sites, the low cost factor and the managed environment (no server updates, Apache configuration, keeping MySQL up-to-date, etc.) is very desirable for our needs. Ironically, in reading about Cloud computing and setting up systems similar to what we’re doing, the theme was repeated over and over: “your IT or Systems folks will want more control, root access, etc.” – however, in our case, it was our Systems person who asked repeatedly: “Why do you need root access” and argued against it for the reasons I cite above (scalability, managed server environment, etc.) and ultimately convinced us that we think that indeed we do NOT need root access, at least at this point.

So, we’re diving deeply into our programming and implementation phase of preparing Drupal for ca. 70 sites, each with their own Drupal but managed from a central or master Drupal install – “Multi-site with single codebase” as it’s called in Drupalese.

Drupal – and heeeeere we go!

Have been away most of June but am back now and ready to properly take on Drupal…

We installed Acquia Drupal over a month ago now and will soon move from “playing” to the real, nitty-gritty work of configuring a master Drupal installation to run our 70-odd sites. Basically, we have installed Drupal in the cloud and will use this one Drupal install to run our main site plus our 70 affiliate sites. The question(s) that face us now are many and filled with minutiae that relate to how we currently manage our sites in the Dreamweaver world. One of the biggest challenges I see so far is to think differently about how we work. There is no de facto reason why we have to replicate exactly the work patterns, workflows and systems we currently use. Perhaps Drupal has a better way!

I’m finding the following difficult:

• organizing my team – until now, I’ve just given rough parameters for each programmer and turned them loose to play; now, however, it’s time to reign everyone in and get some focus. Tricky stuff…
• recognizing dependencies between possible ways of doing things: if we choose x or y method in Drupal to manage a or z how will the first decision affect the latter, and how to know!
• prioritization: themes then content? or get the systems for content in place then worry about how they look? etc.

We have about 3-4 months for the “programming & implementation” phase before we are scheduled to enter the “deployment and testing” which includes data migration. Are we insane or can this be done in that amount of time?!

Drupal – modules, blocks, configurations, oh my!

So, we’re underway with our single Drupal installation in the Mosso Cloud Sites platform. We will eventually have 70-80 websites running on a single install of Drupal there. Right now, we have to actually learn how to use Drupal! Thankfully, there seems to be no shortage of resources. Just a few:

• http://drupal.org/getting-started/before/overview (a must-read)
• http://gotdrupal.com/ (a great site with Drupal how-to videos)
• http://mydrupal.com/drupal-beginner-videos-basics (20 Drupal videos for beginners)
• http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials (Drupal tutorials)
• http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo (Drupal Dojo)
• http://drupal.org/planet (Planet Drupal)
• http://learnbythedrop.com/ (A place to learn Drupal)
• etc. etc.

But, it is somewhat of a learning curve we’re climbing. I was prepared for this, but it still doesn’t make it any less of a challenge. I’ve read for months now things to the effect of: “Drupal’s got a steep learning curve but once you learn it, you’ll love it!” or similar. I’ll admit, I already love some aspects of it: content creation, taxonomy module, simplicity of user mgmt. (except permissions – too many checkboxes!) and other aspects. But, I found having to do backflips to create a stable homepage a bit weird. But, we’re working through it…

Mosso Cloud Sites and mutliple sites in one Drupal installation

UPDATE! It works!

We have successfully achieved creating multiple sites with one instance of Drupal via Aliases in the Cloud Sites platform. We just tested and seems to work fine!

Last week, on the recommendation of several people from Mosso, we set up a Cloud Sites account with the intention of migrating 80 websites into that platform all running on a single Drupal install. I was told on the phone by 2 people at Mosso that this was do-able. After the initial installation and testing, we were unclear as to how this would work with Apache config access so that we could configure the virtual host entry in httpd.conf. So, I tweeted this question out on my Twitterfeed. Someone from Mosso responded saying that in fact, what we were attempting wasn’t possible – that we, in fact, needed a Cloud Server. Also, we asked one of our consultants and were pointed to this blog post. Very frustrating…

But, I persisted with Mosso and setup a Cloud Servers account and called a meeting with our current systems people. In the meantime, I canceled the original Cloud Sites account at which time I was contacte by an Account Manager at Mosso who inquired as to why we were canceling. I explained the situation and he responded that I had gotten bad info. That, in fact, we CAN, I repeat, CAN run multiple sites from one instance of Drupal in the Cloud Sites platform. That, while they don’t support wildcard DNS, they do have an “alias” system that allows for subdomains or other domains to point to a single instance of Drupal on another site. So, we could have www.oursite.com as the “primary” site where Drupal is isntalled and many subdomain.oursite.com sites that, via the “alias” in Cloud Sites, point to the www.oursite.com install and are thus run by it, Drupal-speaking. This was fantastic news. We really didn’t want to have to mess with a server, keep it up-to-date, etc.

So, now we’re testing this by attempting to point real domains that we own to our new Cloud Sites IP and see if the aliasing will work. It looks promising as it worked on a local installation we have of Drupal here. But, through all of this, I have to say that Mosso’s so-called “fanatical tech support” is the real reason that a) we figured this out and b) are still a customer of Mosso. Thanks, Mosso folks!

‘Semantic Web for Dummies’ and Semantic Universe site

So, I obtained a copy of the book, ‘Semantic Web for Dummies.’ Not that I consider myself a semantic web “dummy,” but I feel like I am constantly in need of simple, clear and concise paradigms within which to explain, conceive of and think about the so-called semantic web or Web 3.0. I find that if I can easily explain to someone else, preferable a “layperson,” what promise standards like RDFa and OWL hold, then it might actually have a chance of working, taking hold and finally changing the web of documents into a web of data.

Thus far, I’ve only read the introduction but am hope to see concrete examples of  “how the typical Internet user will recognize the effects of the Semantic Web” (from the Amazon.com description). I will post again once I’m into the book a little and can make a decision on whether to recommend it or not.

Interestingly, the book comes with an insert advertising the site Semantic Universe. I had discovered this site sometime last month. Seems like a great/useful site. It was a double-find for me as it’s a site about Semantic Web AND it’s a Drupal site!

Drupal is now in the cloud!

Okay, we have our first Acquia Drupal installation in our cloud. Now working through some important configuration/backend information architecture decisions that will likely affect all we do going forward with Drupal. One of the biggest and actually most basic decisions we’ve made is whether to have one master drupal installation/MySQL database to run all 80-odd sites we manage or to have one master installation of Drupal with 70-odd separate sites (subdomains) each with their own “installation profile” of Drupal and their own MySQL database. The latters seems to be the best choice for us for many reasons:

• keeping them separate allows for modular testing and implementing of modules and tweaks per site rather than having to implement something across sites when perhaps only a few need the feature
• separate databases means, in theory, better performance
• although this makes sharing of content among the sites more challenging, it seems that Drupal allows ways for separate MySQL tables (DBs) to communicate with each other – or, we simply use RSS to get structured XML between sites – either way, it’s doable and seems preferable over having one master database, especially from the individual webmaster of each of our sites’ perspective
• etc.

So, for now, we’re playing around with our Acquia Drupal installation and installing some basic modules:

• views module
• devel module
• cck module
• installation profiles
• others?

and getting a feel for how to map what we’ve been doing in Dreamweaver and our other various and sundry systems (Java, JBoss, etc.) onto the corresponding “node” in the Drupal universe. The use of the word “node” there is a slight play-on-words – Drupal uses the term node to refer to anything stored in it’s database…

Random questions about Drupal

In the next few weeks, we’ll begin work on developing our Drupal environment to which we’ll migrate roughly 80 sites. Random questions I have as we begin this process:

1. We’re putting Drupal in the cloud – other than installing Drupal, PHP, MySQL (newest version), what else do we need to get started?
2. I’ve asked this before on Twitter and directly to some people: is there an installation of Drupal that comes pre-packaged with all the basic modules one would need say to create a large, multi-lingual website with 70-odd subdomains (sub-sites)?
3. Related to 2, is there a better way to navigate the modules available on drupal.org – for instance, logical groupings of modules (i.e., if you need to do X task, this group of modules works, etc.)
4. Should we start with theming and geting the look and feel right first and then build menus, set up search, piece together or custom program modules, test and then migrate content?
5. Where is the best place to view case studies of people who have done this all before?

I know some of these questions might be obvious but being new to Drupal, they are the kinds of things that I’m thinking about broadly. I’m also thinking about how to do X specific task or Y specific setup but I’m trying to get my head around the “larger” questions/issues first. At least, what I think are the larger issues…

Semantic Web and Drupal

A huge bonus to choosing Drupal as our new CMS (or CMF – Conent Management Framework, which better describes, it seems, Drupal’s abilities) is the attention being paid by the Drupal community to interoperability with semantic web standards such as RDF/RDFa. The Semantic Web Drupal Group is active in this area:

“This group was started at DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. It includes discussions on how to integrate the Semantic Web into Drupal and list the various effort of the community towards enabling RDF in Drupal.” (from their site)

This seems to me a logical way for semantic web technologies (RDFa, OWL, etc.) to enjoy more widespread adoption on the web – to integrate their “deployment” into already existing systems such as Drupal. For someone like me, who is overseeing the migration of 80-odd websites into Drupal and would like these site to be semantic web-ready, a CMS-level integration of these standards makes the task less daunting. After all, it really should be the case that one simply enables semantic web technologies for one’s site thereby exposing the data and making the web a much richer place. In other words, I still “believe” in the semantic web as first laid out by Tim Berners-Lee in his 2001 paper and think we’ve come a long way toward the idea of a web of data/linked data. Initiatives like Drupal’s Semantic Web Group just make it easier TO believe…